Sometimes . . . oftentimes . . . the less obvious the race, the more compelling the ride.

There probably wasn't a less populated Winner's Enclosure all week than that which greeted You're Special as amateur jockey Richard Harding rode in on him after the Kim Muir Handicap on Wednesday. Moscow Flyer had been retired just over an hour previously, a big gamble had just been landed in the Coral Cup with Sky's The Limit and anyone still left at the racecourse was tossing coins over what to pick in the Bumper. And yet there, in the gloaming, lay the sweetest, saddest and most human story of the week.

Brendan and Diane O'Rourke are from Naas. A young couple in their early 30s, they've spent most of the last year in a tragic funk, the result of losing their young daughter due to complications during her birth.

Wednesday didn't make everything okay again, but it made things a little better, for a little while at least.

"I bought the horse for my wife last summer, " says Brendan. "We'd been going through a very hard time. We had had a little daughter, Kate, and it was a complicated pregnancy and unfortunately she didn't pull through. We were devastated, as I'm sure you can imagine.

"So last July, I decided to buy a horse for Diane in memory of our daughter in heaven.

And what can I say? Here we are on the biggest stage in National Hunt racing and Kate's obviously looking down on us. To win any race at Cheltenham must be incredible but to win with this horse. . . it's hard to put into words. What can you say? It's very emotional."

They'd gone into the race thinking they had a chance but not with You're Special.

Their other horse in the race, Underwriter, had been wellfancied after getting the Pricewise nod in the morning's Racing Post. But that horse ran a disappointing 12th, leaving You're Special to sail home three-and-a-half lengths clear, a nice touch at 33-1. It didn't count towards the final total of 10 Irish winners for the week but it may as well have. Owned by an Irish woman, trained by an Irishman abroad in Ferdy Murphy, ridden by an Irish jockey in Harding. Just about all that's English about the horse is the grass he's fed on.

"Ferdy bought him at the Doncaster sales last summer.

This was just around the very worst of times for me and my wife. It was hard to even think straight when I was talking to people. But I was on the phone to Ferdy with a million things going through my head and he read out the list of horses he'd bought. One of them registered with me.

"I said, 'What's the name of that one?'

'You're Special, ' he said.

'What's he like?'

'He's a grand big lad, a nice horse.'

'You're Special, did you say?'

"So I decided it would be a nice thing to do for my wife, to give her a bit of a lift. Obviously, if I could swap everything around I would, but Kate's up in heaven making sure we're getting on with life here without her. And she's won the Kim Muir now. Not bad for her first horse at Cheltenham.

And to think, they almost missed the race. Brendan and his brother had been in Newmarket with Diane's father looking at the plantation stud he'd just bought ("A few nice foals, " says Brendan) and by the time they got on to the motorway and towards Cheltenham, well, let's just say that if the speed cameras were quick enough to catch them, there's probably a few penalty points in the post.

"But we had to make it here for this. This is special. This is my brother's first ever time at the races. One race, one win.

Not bad, is it?"

Not bad at all. One last thing, though. In that Winner's Enclosure, it was Brendan and his mother-in-law who went up to collect the prize on Diane's behalf. How come?

"Oh, Diane's at home. She couldn't make it here because she's pregnant again."

Plot, subplot, character, heart. Theatre doesn't begin to cover it.